Scars Revisited
by whatsthefracas
Summary: UPDATED! a follow-up to a one-shot from long ago. Everyone in the gang wears scars.
1. Chapter 1

A/N: It feels like it's been years since I wrote _Scars_. Here's a kind of sister-piece. If writing is relative. Sorry, that pun sounds hilarious to me at the moment. Whatever. I'm having a manic moment and forty-five minutes into it, I end up with this. Read on, mes chers.

* * *

Scars aren't the sort of thing you show off, like necklace-gifts you wear begrudgingly. Nor are they the kind of thing you hide, like an engagement ring given in a tree. They're there. A reminder of pain, but nothing more than a mark, like scratches on a wooden tag—your membership in a collective of people who have been hurt in the pursuit of something bigger. Something of stories.

Marian has her fair share of bruises. She lives boisterously, unapologetically. If the Nightwatchman happens to get cut by Sir Guy of Gisbourne, it is merely a complication that Marian has to then wear a fresh bandage to an archery tournament. It isn't a problem. It is a _complication_. An occupational hazard. If you're going to be a hero, then you have to be prepared to deal with that kind of thing. You have to not think that slicing your hand instead of the apple is difficult. In fact, you have to do it without thinking at all.

It's the not thinking about the consequences, that's the key. But rather seeing the necessity, bright, bold, flashing, urgent necessity. Like cutting off your hair to keep a part of you safe—Djaq's own kind of scar. The scar of her womanhood as the world saw it. For herself it is guarded and intact, latent, waiting, but to anyone on the streets of foreign places it was erased, though the softness of her face and shape peeks through like writing not quite washed off, like cuts not quite healed.

See, to be a hero, you have to learn to walk with these unhealed blisters, you have to forget the raw rubbing and give yourself up to instinct, the animal identity. Like the fretting, scurrying squirrel Much becomes to cover over what can't show, a bushy tail over precious acorns, memories, secrets, desperate moments. Someone has to be the keeper of them, has to carry them quietly, the silent bearer of others' grief, others' scars, others' regrets.

For regrets only hinder a hero. Better to pack them up tightly and thrust them into a fallen log, the angry pain inside manifest in unnatural strength. John is the master of transforming what hurts into what heaves, hefts, and hoists, in impervious displays of scar-bred bravado. There's no question where inhuman feats have their origin—it's in the undressed wound, bleeding silently under the skin of meeting needs.

Because it always comes back to necessity. Examined with that strict lens, all the lovely trappings of life seem to shrink. Until even family disappears—a mother withering away without food, a father maimed and murdered, a brother gone to who really knows wear, and for what? Which Will won't let himself wonder, save in absolute isolation, a rarity for someone who lives for others. No private pain in a world dependent on unencumbered heroes. You can nurse the hurt when the battle's won.

The battle will be won. Or else Robin Hood has been walking through life with barely-knotted bandages for nothing. And nobody has scars for nothing.


	2. Chapter 2

A/N: So, I was watching the "Farewell to Marian" thing on the last disc of the DVD set and I was pretty annoyed to hear that they killed her because they thought it would be really "interesting" to the story line. Like taking away the happy ending people expect is somehow fascinating. Or like they're going to draw more viewers who are intrigued to see Robin without Marian. I would just like to go on record saying I hope their little plot-meddling plan fails miserably. There. Now, to cope, and because I promised to amend this to include Allan, I'm updating this one-shot.

* * *

For heroes there is no path of least resistance. Everything is a struggle, every outcome a near-end. They learn not to look for green pastures. Allan wouldn't have recognized one, anyways, if he were standing in the middle of it. He had so long gotten used to the murkiness he lived in. Having been baptized in youth as a ne'er-do-well, he put his faith fully in the trinity of lie-cheat-steal. It was only recently that he realized he could actually do some good. But old habits, cultivated by new motives, are still old habits. The problem for him was every scrape he'd just barely gotten out of left a marked impression on him, until before he knew it, he had a real chip on his shoulder. Perfectly acceptable for heroes, but Allan wasn't the hero, now was he? And that hurt most of all.

Every step he took in black leather took him farther from what he truly wanted, but he hardly understood that it was the source of his pain. It rather felt like a thorn, stuck under fabric from a brush in the woods, a reminder that he had once lived there with people who loved him. And while the thorn cut away in tiny, pricking repetition, Allan learned that heroes aren't measured by the length of their story, but by how enduringly they accept each little scar.

All one had to do was watch Robin to learn how. After a wound too real to survive stole his Marian, Robin bled, openly, always, and never noticed. New scars intersected the old until none of them seemed important. Everyone in the gang had their own cuts to mend, but above all else, they were to hold vigil over Robin, to stop the blood, to remind him of what had value, to help him heal. Followers to a leader who lost all feeling of pain, they performed the task thanklessly, certain that if they did not see him through to his hero's end, he would not make it there at all.

You don't earn your place in stories if you close your eyes when things get horrifying. You dig your hands into the gore and find that vein.


End file.
